May 3
Disdain, momming and such. Baklava!
1965
Boy was it hot today! I'll bet it was in the 90's. Marcia and I went to a track meet. I took Dad's binoculars so I could see better. Marcia used them most of the time to watch some guy on the other team she liked. She found out his name was Jeff. He was a pretty good athlete.
I was watching V. Big deal. He looks like a T-shirt doll stuffed with mothballs.
Comment 2006
Oh, my. Was I really that transparent in my loud expressions of disdain? Oh my.
1992
Two days ago was Kiddo 1’s tenth birthday. That seems at once eons ago and only yesterday. They were so little, so sweet, so much a puzzle to their poor, inexperienced parents. We seem to have figured it out. Kiddo is lurching towards puberty, sometimes breathtakingly grown up and responsible, sometimes peevish and aggravating. Mostly they remain wonderful company, easy to talk to, and a joy to live with.
1997
Kiddo 1 has turned fifteen and (briefly, I hope) backslid into careless ways.
I return to my thoughts of so long ago - what do I fear? Most of all, I fear ending up like my mother - alone and lonely, with the people I love seeing spending time with me as a duty. That’s what it is, a duty, or when I am feeling positive about it, a privilege. (After all, I am lucky to have my mother still living.) I used to think that falling out of love with someone was nature; and inevitable, a genetic trait in my blood. But it has not happened. In the early years, my fear of relationships made me reluctant to be in love, to abandon myself completely to Jim’s love for me. I believed that it couldn’t last.
I don’t think I ever thought about estrangement or abandonment explicitly when I became a mother. But I realize now that my joy in the mother-child bond and the pleasure I have in our times together was based on a conviction that we were different. I never felt that way about my mother, so that pleasure was proof that Kiddo and I would always be close. But the older they got, and the less we interacted, the more I worried that I wasn’t safe from losing her. Last year was absolutely terrifying, especially my inability to help her. This fed my darkest fear: that they would grow to hate me and I would lose a person I felt closer to that anyone else in the world. Now that is a scary thought. Is it healthy for me to feel that way, when I also have a husband and another child. I love them both, too. If I am so afraid of losing Kiddo 1, why do I find myself compelled to behave in ways that drive her away?
Comment 2023
Kiddo has grown up and become a stepmother, a mother, and now a grandmother. I have also grown into a grandmother and a great-grandmother. I am still learning the grandmother thing. Not having had a whole lot of direct experience having grandparents, it’s a bit of a challenge. And the mother thing never really ends. “It’s just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea”.
Current situation 2023
Movie night tonight! I will be watching Zorba the Greek with a few friends. Debating whether to spend the afternoon finishing the book, as there are only a few more chapters to go. I have already done the most important thing:
I need to dig up a copy of my dissertation to share with my Substack buddy, Ryan.